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Aspens

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About the Photographer

Bamberger, Tom

American, b. 1948

Tom Bamberger's digitally created panoramas are inspired by one question — how far can the horizon line of an image be convincingly extended? Attracted to inherently repetitious scenery — housing developments, farmland, highways, vineyards — Bamberger seamlessly extends these landscapes by drawing and repeating information from single negatives. He likens the process to cultivating a virus, explaining that, "in either a computer or a Petri dish, something reproduces itself until it reaches a critical mass where you can see it with greater clarity." As the landscapes grow and the repetition becomes more easily identified, his questioning becomes more complicated. How natural or artificial are these images when repetition is intrinsic to these subjects to begin with? Bamberger then works with the cloned imagery, removing the limb of a tree, or adding a window to a house, in an effort to mimic the subtle diversity already existing in these scenes. By blurring the line between his digital alterations and the existing shape of the landscape, Bamberger questions the nature of repetition, arguing that there is little difference between, for example, DNA's reproductive process in a forest or field and the computer cloning that his work depends on.

Bamberger attended Boston University and later completed an MFA at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he studied philosophy and taught mathematical logic. He served as an adjunct curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum for ten years and he is currently a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.